Symptoms While accelerating hard over a low canal bridge with a small bump the bike engine died followed by a ½ mile push home. It was later discovered the fuel pump / injector fuse had blown.

This was replaced and the fault re-occurred again.

Armed with advice from MD Racing and a full Ducati workshop manual I stripped down the whole bike. - Inspected the loom and found no faults. - Inspected the petrol pump (inside the tank) and found what I thought to be the fault* a short on the internal wires. The short was caused by a “tea bag” of fuel catalyst which was suspended from the inside of the filler cap. The bag is made of very sharp stainless and the bag had become entangled with the internal fuel pump wires. Although I couldn’t actually see any damage I assumed the worst, replaced the wires and encased them in a protector and securely attached the catalyst to the petrol pump.

Warning During my inspection I found considerable corrosion around some of the electrical connectors on the right hand side of the motorcycle. Namely the lower relays and battery auxiliary connectors. I cleaned these up then sealed them with self amalgamating tape. This motorcycle was kept out of the rain for the first 3 years of its life (before I had it ), so the corrosion occurred within 1 year!

Thinking the fault was repaired I set off, only to have the symptoms re-appear. While waiting for the recovery service I found that the DATATOOL alarm wires (not covered in the factory manual) had become unravelled and were now sitting on the rear down pipe. This had melted through and was causing the fault. I had failed to take into account the alarm wiring when checking the loom . The alarm comes with Ducati connectors, albeit they are way too long and would allow the alarm to be fitted 3-4’ away from the bike!! Rather than cut them off and remake them, the installer had wound them up into a ball and put them into a plastic shrink wrap pipe. Unfortunately this eventually failed.

I can understand why the installer didn’t want to shorten the wires as the tool for making the connectors costs over £200!